That’s what I hear: a Joycean overture coming from the speakers of Anne Hardy’s installation for Week 26 of Fig-2. She herself has “rrmmmph, huoooghg, op, mmmuuow, ip” which is just as good. Orthography (how we write down the spoken word as text) is an arbitrary, personal art. Joyce himself to great acclaim had Bloom’s cat inUlysses say not “Meow” but “Mkgnao!”

You can listen to an excerpt of this soundtrack “rrmmmph, huoooghg, op, mmmuuow, ip” and imagine having it going on at full volume all day long, as the fig-2 team do. Over 45 minutes I found It oddly reassuring, even friendly, but then I like controlled noise. I’m not sure I’d like it nine to five, though to be honest I have exactly that myself: a constant soundtrack of uncontrolled asymmetrical noise, chatter, smoking, sirens, and an alarm that constantly goes off when someone constantly opens the gate constantly all day. Jessie says the Hardy soundtrack isn’t so bad but that you’d then go out and a car could crash behind you and wouldn’t notice to turn around.

The soundtrack is heavily edited and processed audio from recordings of Anne Hardy installing and creating sculptural work in her studio, leftovers from physical work, just as the space is strewn with physical leftovers of this other work that is absent. Plasterboard shapes being cut, scrunched up tape, big scrapes of smashed up concrete: your brain tries to connect the sounds to the objects, but both aspects resist each other.

The speaker system by Flare Audio uses waves or something instead of compressing air so it can be much louder than conventional speakers. It is a remarkable technical advance and Flare’s technology to have been taken seriously by sound engineers and audio nutjobs. The sound is vivid and punchy, and I know this is how I experienced the sound and it wasn’t an illusion caused by having been told about the special sound system because in my notes I wrote “Very vividly recorded sounds. Very punchy sound.” (though admittedly my notes on things are mostly a higher form of complete drivel).

The carpet is the glorious “process blue” of pure cyan. A darkish inscrutable blue that makes objects a buoyancy in an alien visual field that invites the eye in and projects the objects back out.

In such an environment with this vocabulary of sounds you do start to not so much hallucinate but question the origin of the noises. Was that noises off or did it come from the speaker? Irene steps through and kicks the bin, Jessie’s heels scrape, I blow my nose then sniff. I think that motorbike was outside. You forget what’s inside and what outside, start hearing things, imagining you hear things. The sounds pile up on themselves and create little narratives.

Think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth – du-du-du-DUH. Most sound you hear is just du-du-du or DUH. Joining them together, however, you can create pattern. In Anne Hardy’s soundtrack I hear the long swelling sound of water followed by a weird click edited and juxtaposed to punctuate and create a phrase which is essentially musical.

It’s a terrific use for ‘found sounds’. Years ago I went to a Wire Salon (a Q&A organised by the fiercely mandarin music magazine Wire) about field recordings, and one of the big questions raised was ‘After you’ve recorded all this stuff, what do you do with it?’ We sound recordists have hours and hours of birdsong and crowd noise and trains going out and coming in and beaches. I genuinely have a recording of complete silence (from an anechoic chamber – it sounds really odd).

The economy of Anne Hardy using discarded parts of sculptural processes in exhibiting them and soundtracking them makes her the green champion of fine art practice. Throughout her work she has also scoured the streets of Hackney for objects that she can introduce into her work.

She made her name constructing weird spaces of which she would then take a single photo which would be all that remained of it (she wasn’t always a green champion). They’re completely amazing. Her practice later took her into creating these spaces so that not one but several photos would be needed to capture them, and to not to be so rigidly ephemeral but so that people could enter them, adding a third dimension. Her Fig-2 show takes this even further by allowing us into the process of the making of these spaces, and seems very much intended to be viewed as transitional. It will be interesting to see next month in her show FIELD, at Modern Art Oxford, how far along on her trajectory she has gone in moving away from photography and integrating sculptural installation and audio.

Opening up spaces and exposing processes, and centring on the process of making, is a functional kind of art. It’s art about art. Which is fine and modern but doesn’t invoke the sublime or the uncanny. The photos have a perfection. They are pure art. They don’t encode or include their own making except that inasmuch as there is no attempt to disguise the artificiality of the scene. This is what gives the photos their hyperreality. They’re so unreal they seem more real than reality. Jessica Lack says Hardy is “one of a number of contemporary photographers well aware that the documentary look is best recreated by using stage sets.”

The extreme shortness of the depth of field adds to the effect, making the spaces harder to understand and interpret, harder to read. The process of “reading a space” is psychologically charged, and in a sense you project yourself onto it. The ghost in a haunted house is actually just the spectre of your fear. Hardy’s photographic spaces are difficult, and so foreground your own response. It might not be something you are even aware of. The isle is full of noises. You might just feel a bit weird, a bit edgy, start imagining things. . .

INTERACT WITH US

MEMBERS

LONDON ART NETWORK

ArtLyst is the most comprehensive art information website in London. It was created to distribute up-to-date contemporary art news, events, exhibitions, fairs, and auctions. We focus on new and emerging art, including pop-up and temporary exhibitions. Our Web 2.0 social-networking platform allows you to post your professional profile and exhibit work in your own unique gallery. All galleries are curated, vetted, and FREE. The ArtLyst publishing platform gathers together news, reviews, resources, classifieds, and articles. Publish yourself, contribute and reach a wide audience!